The Art of The Interview, or How to Be Invisible

Interviewing for an audio-visual enterprise is an ancient art.

In a good documentary, the star of the interview is the person being interviewed. The interviewer is typically off-camera, and if the interviewer is really good, you’ll never see them or hear them speak. Why?

They ask questions that get full answers.

The art of the interview has been bastardized by today’s TV performer who wants not only to look handsome or pretty, but also smart. So they ask a lot of rapid fire questions. They’ve only got a minute, and they are thinking Emmy. So these questions contain major hints at the answer the interviewer is looking for.

Interviewer: Tell me about how horrible you must feel now that you’re house has burned down?

Interviewee: I feel bad.

Well, yes. But it can be worse. I often hear local cable interviewers ask the question this way:

Interviewer: The fact that your house burned down must make you feel awfully bad, doesn’t it?

Interviewee: Yes, yes it does.

Interviewer: How bad?

Interviewee: pretty bad.

Pretty bad, indeed.

In a corporate long form documentary style video, an ideal scenario is the video that can be “narrated” solely by the interviewees, through their own words, in complete and meaningful sentences. Suffice it to say that this is hard work. You must ask the right questions in the right fashion and then have the editing chops to put it together into a compelling narrative that has a beginning, middle, climax, and end. The interviewee will not be a talking head on camera, so you have no excuse to make your interviews TV style, where editing would cause unsightly jump cuts (therefore giving the producer an excuse to edit less. More gross profit!)

Some producers will pretend that TV style interviews are the right way to sell business-to-business products and services. That’s ridiculous. Looking at two talking heads blathering on without b-roll, music, or story is an absolute waste of a company’s dollars. That producer has no intention of working for his or her money.

We believe in interview style videos, just as surely as we believe in unstaged actualities to convince audiences of a product’s quality or a company’s intent or philosophy.

Yes, it takes longer, and it costs a bit more. But the shelf life can be very long, and the impact multi-tiered. Its a technique that works at meetings, or on the web. Consider this technique for your next video.

An example can be found by clicking on the image below.

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You’ve read elsewhere on VideoStory Secrets that you’re not going to get anywhere without a demo reel.

Well here, courtesy of the Viral Video Film School on CurrentTV, is a look at demo reels that will get you absolutely nowhere.

Tribute Videos are videos that celebrate a person, couple, group, or institution. They can be engagement videos, anniversary videos, memorials, retirement videos, milestone birthday videos, company histories, leadership stories, school reunion stories, award-winner portraits, and more. They are at home in the living room, rec room, boardroom or ballroom.

Tribute videos are how I got my start. (See “AVSquad” in the links.) And they remain the most satisfying of the work that we do. There is nothing like telling a people story.

A lot of people are into video these days, some as a hobby, some as a potential profession, some as part of their job duties. There is a perception that video is easy, thanks to point and shoot miniature cameras, computer editing, and thousands of tipsters on-line telling you how easy it is and selling something– usually hardware.

But hardware is only part of the problem, and hardware and editing software are covered pretty readily via training web sites, DVD lessons, and more.

No one is training people on how to tell a compelling story. How to interview, how to move pictures, how to choose music, how to pace videos, how to get a visceral reaction from an audience!

That’s where “Tribute Videos for Love & Money” comes in.

Tribute Videos for Love & Money

It’s an ebook that details my communications beliefs and systems. If you like samples of my work, and you want to know how and why certain creative decisions were made, this is the place to start. It concentrates on the “Tribute” people story type of video, but frankly, if you can tell that kind of story, there isn’t much you won’t be able to do as you grow your capability or career.

For more information, go to videostoryschool.com.

I hope you like it and find it valuable.

Just bumped into this from a sight called Remarkable Communications. It’s worth a gander.

This family history DVD  was created as a Christmas gift from parents to their sons and daughter and their childrens’ children. What an amazing and thoughtful gift. While it preserves photos and especially 8mm films that had not been seen in decades, the larger story is the interviews from the parents that pepper the story. This excerpt hopefully will give you the flavor of a compelling, lasting keepsake not possible in any other way.

Recorded in my mobile recording studio outside of Stop & Shop, Phillipsburg, NJ.

An Introduction to SlideShow Secrets

There are two ways to approach writing a script for a video: before you shoot, and after you shoot.

Before you shoot is where the majority of corporate and event videos land; after you shoot usually indicates that you’re conducting interviews and won’t know what material you’ll have until after the interviews.

Let’s look at the first, and most traditional, method.

Scriptwriting is the art and craft of extrapolating a creative approach into a working creative plan. A script is more than just the words. It is the blueprint that indicates the structure or flow of your video, what kinds of shots are necessary, what kinds of graphics are appropriate, and what types of music might be used or created.

My first business partner couldn’t do wordplay worth a damn, but he actually was an excellent scriptwriter, because he knew how to pace a piece of communications. So whether you think you’re a writer or not, let’s look at the basics of how you can craft your creative blueprint.

The Creative Plan

Before you begin writing, you must know what your strategy is. Whether you’re selling widgets or telling the life story of Uncle Teddy, you must know your beginning, middle and end.

I believe all creative plans follow some essential rules of marketing, and often follow the same basic outline for the script.

Marketing Rules

These hardly ever vary. They are called many things, have sold a lot of books, and been rehashed over and over.

But they work. It’s all centered around the person you’re trying to sell. It’s called the USP, or unique selling proposition. Ya gotta have one!

From the USP comes the ability to do the following:

State a clear benefit.
Offer proof.
Have a unique angle.
Show the solution.
Eliminate objections.
Ask for the sale (or the demo).

In the video script world, this might look like:

Introduction or Premise
Who we are
What we do
Why we’re different
What’s in it for you
Ask for the sale

Really. That’s about it. Remember, this is not a brochure. People’s attention spans are short.

Now, let’s say you want to create buzz so that MyCO, your new computerized inventory management company (and its new product, “The Docufab 5000”), can look large enough to compete with the big dog in your field— we’ll call them BigCo.

BigCo owns the market, but they’re— big. Slow to innovate, slow to respond to customer requests. They haven’t revised their product offering in 5 years.

You want to eat their lunch (or, if you’re starting out, any lunch at all), and you have just the product to do it.

You have just enough money to make a video, which you figure you’ll show to customers on your laptop, in your trade show booth (a massive 8’x10’ with a table), and on your website.

Video Outline

Let’s look at the questions to ask yourself.

What outcome do I want from this video?
What unique thing does my company offer?
How does this product embody that unique feature (or philosophy)?
What’s in it for the customer?
What hang-ups does the customer have?
How do we move to the next step?

In this case, the next step is being put on the bid list, being asked to make a presentation to upper management, or being asked to make a proposal. This is also the outcome you want.

You are sensitive to the needs of the industry and are a house of ideas, moving fast, developing solutions, adapting your patented technologies to companies large and small.

Your product offers ImageFast, a revolutionary way to reduce scan time and speed document flow over traditional Cat5 wire.

This will offer the customer a direct impact in greater productivity, faster shipping turnaround, less time spent running around looking for manuals, and allow the company to sell and ship more of whatever it is they do. (The hidden bonus is the hero factor— the person that buys this product will introduce such productivity and profit to the company that he or she will get a raise and a corner office— of course, this is implied, not stated.)

Now think it through— you’ve got a better product than BigCo— is there anything that would make a potential customer NOT buy what you’re selling?

Yes, you’re young enough to look like you just came out of high school. Your track record is neither good nor bad— it’s empty. So you get an endorsement from your Uncle Don who’s a well known civil engineer (or a past customer, if you’re well established).  Maybe you grow a beard.

And you offer a guarantee.

The Final Structure

So now, let’s look at our final outline:

Document management is slow, and industry leaders are not keeping up with bandwidth demands.
You have a solution that’s unique to the industry.
You are MyCo, a company dedicated to R&D and solutions that provide productivity and profit. You never stop innovating.
The Docufab 5000 blows the competition away. You proceed to tell how. (features)
The Docufab 5000 will change your company for the better, is upgradable, etc. (benefits)
Let us demonstrate our system and give you a quote. If you’re not 100% satisfied, we’ll (fix it, refund your money, whatever…)— we believe in our product and good old-fashioned customer service.

Okay, now you have to add spice, or the hook— the unique angle. You’re dedicated to productivity, speed, and service. For a fraction of what BigCo might quote for a new system, you will revolutionize the customer’s business with profits, productivity, and volume.

All the customer has to do is— “Do the Math.”

That becomes your hook. It’s a good one, because it de-emphasizes being big, established, safe, etc. It says, “If I can offer you my unique solution to save you this much money— will you take a chance on me?”

We’re skimming the surface, but at least now you’ve thought through goal setting and creative planning for almost any video project, at least those that are written before the shooting begins.

Now, HOW to write the words is another story, and one we’ll tell soon.

Want to see the video this story was actually based on? Go to http://www.vimeo.com/806538.

Next time, more specifics on how to write a script.

This blog– VideoStory Secrets– is intended to be a free repository of tutorials, lessons, samples, explanations, and other information regarding the art of “Video Storytelling.”

We did have a few entries already uploaded, and propagating nicely, when someone I hit– the wrong button.

Well, you know what havoc that can wreak. But it gave us a chance to enhance a few things, and develop more free offerings, which you’ll see here soon.

In the meantime, I realigned some of the website hosting, moved this from there to here and there, and here we are.

And just in time. Today, we quietly launched the sale of our book, “Tribute Videos for Love & Money”, which is really a book about how to tell a video story, or more bluntly, how to make really good videos.

It uses as it’s main examples “Tribute videos”, videos produced to tell someone’s life story, either for a company or private (personal) function.

It is 120 pages or so, generously illustrated, and is accompanied by tutorials and samples, some ready now, some ready soon.

I hope you’ll consider looking at what the book has to offer and perhaps purchasing a copy for your family video-maker, your company video people, or yourself. There are a lot of good ideas in it, and a pretty good explanation of the philosophies and structures of videomaking we have been using for the past 35 years.Go here: http://www.videostoryschool.com.

Thanks

Brien Lee.